


Radio to the New World

by Scappodaqui



Series: Radio [2]
Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Atom Bombs, Domestic Howling Commandos, Dugan's circus stories, Dum Dum's hat feels, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Historical Accuracy, Howling Commandos banter, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism, Post-World War II, Radio, Radio Host Jim Morita, Romance, Sansei Jim Morita, Stoic Cowboy Jim Morita, Symbolism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-11-11
Packaged: 2018-04-19 09:22:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4741133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scappodaqui/pseuds/Scappodaqui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On your radio show, people all across the country can hear the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.  Your brother David plays the violin for them now. The delicate pluck of strings can be felt clear through America, and the first song you broadcast is Dvorak’s <i>Symphony for a New World</i>.  It becomes the music you always play as the show opens, the stirring, thrumming, triumphant thunder of it. The moments of slow quiet that hold it together. The blasts that burst forth once more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You wind up with four broken ribs and a cracked clavicle after getting pinned by an overturned jeep. You were acting as a decoy, broadcasting the noises of a false troop through your stereophone. A shell hits the front of the jeep and flips it, and you go end over end, a metal jostle so disorienting that for a second, coming to, you have no idea if you’re still tumbling or if everything’s gone still. Your ears ring with the freight-train sound of the shell.

You drag yourself out from under the deflating rubber wheel that’s probably saved your life, cushioned you from the full weight of the jeep.

You call for help on the Gibson Girl Emergency Radio you have with you, that was tied down in the jeep and luckily sustained no damage. The radio is solid and as voluptuous as indicated by the name, shaped like a violin, like a figure 8. '88,' before the Nazis got their hands on it, was radio ham shorthand for ‘love and kisses.’ You used to sign your letters to Mika that way ‘til you realized--it also means HH, Heil Hitler--and you had to stop because damn if people didn’t already think you might be Fifth Column.

The Gibson Girl radios are based on a design first created by the Nazis and later appropriated by your side.

Your Gibson Girl emergency radio is named Mika. You crank the generator painfully to life, send up the cheerful kite with the wire on it, and call for help.

You watch the kite bob in the sky, sending your message out through the invisible 80-meter band. Kites. Kites mean good luck. You flew them at home on Boys’ Day, May 5th, and sometimes at the New Year, too, when you remembered. Kites mean good luck, they mean new beginnings. They are the reminder to be strong. To hold tight to the string that tethers hope.

You watch the kite bob and you send your message from Mika the Gibson Girl Radio. Agent Carter radios back to say they’ll pick you up. Roger that.

Over and out.

It’s over. You’re out.

Because you’re one of the Howling Commandos, the doctor in Berlin who examines you doesn’t just patch you up piecemeal. He gives you a full X-ray and shows you the roentgenogram image of your chest developed on specially sensitized film. You stare at it: the luminescent ghostly white of bone, the gray shadows of heart and lungs. The black inner parts of you, illuminated by rays of a particular frequency. The rays are silent, they are invisible, and they pass right through you, showing all of your insides. The picture they bring out could be anyone, really; these images all look anonymous if lined up. The same, down at the bone. The only thing that sets you apart are the places where you are broken.

There will be no lasting damage, but they figure at this point in the war, they may as well offer you an honorable discharge. You sign all sorts of papers about things you won’t be able to talk about to anyone, Top Secret. Bigoted.

The war is now just about mopping up, babysitting Germans who swear they were never Nazis. You wonder where all the Nazis went. It makes you sick when you get to Berlin and see the prosperous families there, pantries full of jam and cured meat and white flour. Round pink-cheeked children. You recall the skinny kids you saw in France and Hungary, to whom you and Barnes started giving your C-ration candy instead of trading it to each other.

Meanwhile, American soldiers have to guard Germans against retaliation, a duty most find onerous at best and odious no matter what. You meet a troop who talk about how they were forced to shoot renegade Russian soldiers who ran away and then stood their ground, who insisted they’ll be killed if they’re sent back to their motherland. You maybe believe them. The other Americans didn’t. They shot at a guy in a tree and then some other soldiers kept shooting. You sort of get their point of view, too. It’s hard to stop sometimes.

So you’re a little glad you get out when you do.

You don’t think of yourself as a hateful person, but you can’t help it. You feel a deep rage at the Germans who insist they were helpless bystanders: silent in the face of what they let sweep over them.

The enemy of freedom is silence, really.

“Can I keep this?” you ask the doctor who shows you the roentgenogram of your chest. The words make your ribs and shoulder ache. Your arm shifts a little in its sling.

“Sure,” he says, waving a hand. “Lots of guys do that. It’s like a trophy.”

If it were about trophies, you’d just wear your Purple Heart. But you don’t. You tuck it away, an inert metal weight in your pocket.

Some of the others are lost in war, you can see it. You recall Sergeant Barnes: you realize you never figured he’d make it home. One way or the other, he got broken up in pieces by the fight that couldn’t be put together. You can see Dugan heading that way. But he does something that surprises you.

The guys all touch you carefully when you get ready to leave, shake your hand, give you pats on the back, careful not to jostle your taped-up ribs. Dernier says, _Au revoir_. Monty says, “Cheers, mate.” Jones says, “See you stateside.” It’s like they want to impress upon you the particularities of their national origin: they want you to remember them as their comic book caricatures, larger than life. Larger than death. The way you all remember Captain America.

But Dugan--Dugan takes off his hat and sets it on your head, and he says, “I figure the luck in this ran out for me, but maybe it’ll do you some good, cowboy.”

And you tip it back to him, and you figure, all right. He’s made his peace.

* * *

 You stand at the railing of the steamship that carries you across the Atlantic and you stare far, far out over the waves.

It takes you such a long time to travel home, such a very long time, such a low murmured frequency of waves that break on the metal siding of the ship; and still, it seems too sudden. The sea change from war to peace, from the Old World to the New.

You look up and see the Statue of Liberty on the horizon, the beacon of her torch upraised. Dum Dum Dugan’s hat shields your eyes from the glare of sun on skyscrapers.

* * *

 The very first thing you do, upon landing at port in New York, is find a telephone at your hotel and call Mika.

Her voice sounds strange over the phone. It’s been a very long time. And you’re not used to wires after all that wireless--you’re still half-afraid the Nazis will be listening in on your noise. She says, “Hello?” The operator has connected you; she knows who it is. It’s just that you can’t speak. Your tongue strangles, tangles on itself.

She says, drily, “Jim, it’s so nice to hear your voice.”

You laugh. She laughs.

You say, “Did you get my package?” See, you’ve sent her the roentgenogram of your chest. The ribs half-broken open and the gray shadow barely visible inside the cage of them.

She says, “And you say you aren’t romantic. You sent me your heart.”

You say, “You had that already.”

She says, “Oh.” Just a tiny sound, crackling over the phone wires and faraway. Much farther-away-sounding even than radio broadcast on the ten-meter band, and even more uncertain in this dim evening light. You bunch the phone cord tightly in your fist.

She says, “You have mine. If you want it.”

You whoop and pull the phone cord out of the wall.

* * *

 You call her back after you have carefully repaired the telephone, soldering wire in place with your radio kit, wrapping it in electrical tape. You apologize to the hotel manager. He looks like he wants to spit at you. You hand him a fiver. You’ve actually _got_ your army pay, Dugan and Carter saw to that, unlike a lot of regular enlistedmen. The hotel manager is somewhat appeased by the payoff, but he leans against the wall with arms crossed and watches while you telephone out again.

You call Mika back, and you say, “Yes?”

She’s sobbing, very far away. She takes a few deep breaths you hear as a crackle over the phone. She says, “I got a job at Philadelphia General. I’ve been staying with your folks, I guess you know that, you knew the address. Your dad’s been having some trouble with his joints but they’re fine. I’m--I’m so sorry, I didn’t know--It was always--I was always--I’m so sorry. I meant to say yes. It was always yes. But I thought you might not--”

You say, “No. I do. I still do.”

She says in a rush, “I want to touch you, I want to see you. I want--”

You say, “Darlin’, I’ve got a guy here listening.” Which he is, on account of he’s worried you’ll break his phone again or maybe thinks you’re a Jap spy even in your army uniform.

She says, “Damn.”

You give a fierce grin. You say, “I’ll get a train out tonight.”

* * *

 On August 7, 1945, just arrived at your parents’ place in Philly, you stare at the headline of the New York Times you picked up at the newsstand down the block.

_First Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan; Missile Is Equal to 20,000 Tons of TNT; Truman Warns Foe of a ‘Rain of Ruin.’_

_New Age Ushered: Day of Atomic Energy Hailed by President, Revealing Weapon._

The Indiana Evening Gazette (there’s an Indiana in Pennsylvania, turns out) publishes a little graphic headed _DEATH KNOCKS AT EVERY JAP’S DOOR._

Later--a few days later--newspapers spread out on your kitchen table and all of you ruffling them so often the edges fray--you read more.

The Philadelphia Tribune writes, “The announcement of the possession and use of an instrument sufficient to wipe out an entire population shocks the sensibilities of normal-minded people. Lodged in the hands of evil men, this power may destroy civilization.”

Ms. Edwina T. Glaseor writes in to the Tribune, too, and opines:

"It is terrifying. Terrifying even though man now sees an entirely new scientific era unfolding in which the energy of the sun will be harnessed—terrifying because its explosive charge, which is probably no bigger than a baseball, does the damage of twenty-thousand tons of TNT—terrifying because this atomic bomb has theoretically multiplied the destructive power of the American fleet of Superforts at least two thousand times—yes, but terrifying most of all because progress in human relations has not kept pace with progress in the physical world.”

You recall Sergeant Barnes’s silly little joke about the war. How he’d always compare it to baseball. “Tagged him out trying to slide home,” he’d say, when he’d shot a Nazi sneaking up behind you. That weird story he told about the guy who dropped a baseball over Normandy when he flew out on D-Day, a baseball with ‘Hell with You, Hitler’ written on it. You wonder if that story was true.

Well, now someone’s dropped a baseball on Hiroshima, and on it is written not Hell with You, Hirohito, but Hell with You, Japs.

Hell with All of Us.

* * *

 In the wake of the blast you get a call from the U.S. Army that advises you in particular to stay home, as if the radiation that hit Hiroshima--that hit Nagasaki three days later--can reach all the way to Philly and hit you, too. You feel like you did during blackouts during the war. Closed in. Waiting. Feels partly like you’re just playing a game and partly like it’s the realest thing there is.

Stay home. Is this home? You have come home not to the sweeping fields of waving wheat you left behind. Those are gone. You have come home instead to flat gray sidewalks. You hear whoever got the farm switched to planting fruit trees there, anyhow.

Is this home? A creaky four-room apartment on the third flight up above a grocer’s store on North American Street and Green. It’s a few blocks from Philadelphia General, where Mika works the night shift. She stays home for three days but the two of you don’t know what to do or say at first. You tiptoe around each other. The soft brush of her hip on yours in the narrow hall between bedrooms and kitchen and the living room where you’ve been sleeping on the couch is a whisper, the beginning of a slow and quiet conversation.

You can live with this for now. You don’t know what to do or say, either.

Your mother cooks for you all. Too much food. Hot heavy steaming pots of rice that leave blisters on her fingers when she stands motionless, transfixed by the voices playing tinny and opinionated on the radio, before you gently take the pot out of her grip and set it back on the stove.

Your father reads the newspapers again and again after dinner. He calls old friends. He smokes his cigarettes, which he shares with you, tapping ash absently onto the overflowing ashtray on the table. A cloud of smoke hovers more or less constantly in the little apartment. A mushroom cloud. Your mother leans in over him when she passes by, hands pressing tight on his shoulders.

He calls Davey, who is out in San Francisco staying with friends while he auditions for the Symphony Orchestra. Davey is fine. He just can’t travel to get to you right now, is all. If he doesn’t make the audition he’ll be back at Oberlin in the fall anyhow. You talk to him yourself, you shut your eyes against the hopeful young bright sound of his voice, which is to your ear like like too much sunlight is to your eyes--it strains them--is strained--strained as though through a dirty window.

“Davey, are you safe?” your mother asks, over and over. Your father says, “He’s fine,” and he sounds tired. You realize his hair is now mostly gray. You take the phone receiver and tell Davey, “I got you a present from the war, I got you a picture of us Commandos signed by Captain America.” Davey says, “I don’t care about that, I want to see my brother.” You say, “Yeah, baby boy.” He says, “Shut _up_.” You do. He says, “No, don’t shut up. What was it like in Europe after we won?”

“Lots of singing,” you say.

After two days in the apartment, going downstairs to the grocer’s to get the minimum of what you need, you venture out for fresh fish. You flinch at every streetcar, at the roar of city noise. It was different in Paris, it was different in Berlin, it was different even in your stopover in New York, because those weren’t supposed to be your home; those places were part of the war, were the surreal landscape you thought you’d get to leave behind.

* * *

You don’t know what to say but your hands remember what to do, and you head up to the flat roof on top of the building and run up your antenna. You wonder what atomic blasts might do to radio waves. You listen to chatter from all over. _Nuclear age_ and _atomic energy_ and _will this end the war?_

What about after the war ends? What about then? You recall the Russians, who’d rather be shot than return home. You--

* * *

Mika follows you upstairs and very gently takes off your headset. There’s nothing either of you can say. She leads you back downstairs, and your hand tangles desperately in her hair as soon as you’re inside. You breathe in her living smell until you feel dizzy with it. Her hairpins come out and scatter like unlit matches over the kitchen floor. She doesn’t care. Her hands are on your shirt buttons, deft and swift as only a nurse’s can be, stripping you. Not in the way she strips anonymous soldiers. Not even the way she used to touch you, which was shy and teasing. But new: soft, tender, pausing to touch your skin, to smooth the fabric of your clothing (your uniform, still, uniforms being the only clothing you’ve got) over the contours of your body.

She rests her head against your shoulder, eyes shut, then looks up at you, gives a smile like the curve of a question mark to which yours, in return, is the answer. She kisses you standing on tiptoe.

You don't know what to say but your hands remember what to do. Yours are calloused by guns and electrical equipment, and hers from rolling bandages and wielding a scalpel to cut sutures and undergoing constant sterile washes. She touches you, runs a hand down your chest, around the tender faded bruises that still stipple your ribs. You deftly undo the clasp of her brassiere, rub your thumbs over her nipples gently the way she likes, like tuning a radio to the right frequency, feeling for static, and she gasps.

You stay in her room, very quiet; your parents are asleep. You can hear the old plumbing in the house creak. It feels unimaginably rich to have bathwater, to have hot food, to have clean hands and the softness of clean sheets and Mika’s soft Gibson Girl body. You slide your hand down and there’s warmth and wet and she says, “My God, I’m sorry,” because it’s her time of the month and there’s a little blood. You’re used to blood, but this kind of blood has a tang wholly unlike the kind you find in a battlefield. It is instead like ocean water, like waves; warm and alive, and the pulse of it mixes with the more urgent wet pulse your fingers draw from her.

You say, “Mika. It’s all right.”

She repeats it, faintly. “All right. All right, Jim. Oh. It’s all _right_.”

You move your thumb and finger on her and she sighs, her knee coming up, her leg wrapping around you, and she clenches, and shudders, the two of you move together, trying to be quiet so your parents don’t hear.

* * *

A new scientific era has been heralded.

The Atomic Age is here.

Is the Radio Age over?

Radio has been a weapon for war, too. It has; you know well how bloody the radio waves in this war ran.

You know that the pulse point of human blood, between destruction and creation, can be very fine.

In September you decide you want your own radio show.

The enemy of freedom is silence, really.

* * *

On your radio show, people all across the country can hear the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Your brother David plays the violin for them now. The delicate pluck of strings can be felt clear through America, and the first song you broadcast is Dvorak’s _Symphony for a New World_. It becomes the music you always play as the show opens, the stirring, thrumming, triumphant thunder of it. The moments of slow quiet that hold it together. The blasts that burst forth once more.

You call your show Radio to the New World.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -[Newspaper articles on the A-bomb.](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/08/10/the-week-of-the-atom-bomb/)


	2. Chapter 2

You stop at the corner store to get a newspaper and somehow wind up coming home with eight tubes of M&Ms and eight packets of Lucky Strikes, too. At first you don’t know why eight; you’re just so dazzled by the well-stocked big clean bright store that you grab what you can and put it on the counter, saying hello to the man who works there, who doesn’t mind you for being Japanese in a white neighborhood. He’s one of the few who doesn’t and that’s why you come to this store, and of course it’s because of Captain America; he got you to sign one of his son’s comics.

Eight cartons of cigarettes and eight tubes of M&Ms. Eight is a lucky number, your grandfather taught you. 88 means love and kisses.

But when you get home and look at the guilty riches you’ve hoarded inside your paper bag, you realize it was for the seven of you and one left over.

Seven men experience an event seven different ways.

You broke down when you discovered the list of experimental subjects in one of the Hydra facilities. The list of ages, recorded in neat commonsensical handwriting, made you shake. Your nightmares are not about the fights, they are about holding paper in your hands that blows away on the wind, and names you cannot remember. The others didn’t even remember that day, necessarily; it didn’t make an impression on them.

Dernier was wrecked when he saw the Germans drop a shell on a farmhouse in the French countryside right in front of you, near where he used to live. It was the kind of shell that threw off its ring while it flew through the air. It made a strange noise like a dog’s whine. Dernier heard that and for some reason the terrible pitifulness of the tone struck him. He would freeze for a moment whenever you heard that kind of shell from then on. He also had trouble with dogs.

Dogs are bad luck. Your grandpa taught you that, too. You saw lots of dogs at first in Italy and fewer and fewer as the war went on. In France you saw a dog run over a mine. It was trying to get away from the sound of machine gun fire. You can’t figure out if that particular dog was good or bad luck. That’s how it is sometimes.

“Why do _semi_ make that noise?” you asked your grandfather, about the sound of cicadas in summer. He motioned out into the thick buzzing heat where the distant rumble of the tractor sounded and wind blew through wheat and your brother Davey’s dog Treble barked in high-pitched yaps. Your grandfather didn’t like Treble. He pretended he couldn’t pronounce the English name, though he had spoken the language for thirty years. He pronounced the name the same way he did ‘Trouble,’ with a bit of a swallowed ‘r’, which you yourself were always careful not to mimic; he said harsh things to you if you did. Like you were mocking him. Or like he wanted you to do better than he could. Better? Newer. Younger. More tentative. He wanted you to find a voice of your own.

“Everything alive makes noise,” your grandfather said.

That dog in France didn’t have time even for a yip when the mine went off.

It left some impression on you, too, you suppose, for you to be thinking about it now. You remember it when you see the old lady who runs the flower shop down the street walk by with her little Jack Russell terrier trotting on a leash. You jerk your head when you see the dog swerve to sniff at a gutter, at the zigzagging path the animal takes like the zigzags you had to weave to evade the mines Dernier set.

As much of an impression as the dog left on you, you know it bothered Dernier more. Dernier felt very acutely each act of destruction enacted upon his home soil. You understand that. He comes from a farm family too. He understands the terror of buried things that grow and bloom into clouds of red.  Wars that seem to slumber underground and come out every generation, regular as cicadas. Unwelcome every time. And every time leaving more and more buried things behind.

Dernier has written to you in his careless English, interspersed with French that you can reasonably understand by now. He says he will be busy with his own new wife in France and wishes you luck. He sends you a picture of them in Paris. He is smiling. It looks odd on his usually-dour face. His wife is holding him very, very tightly around the waist and staring defiantly into the camera. She has written a note at the bottom introducing herself as Yvette and letting you know that she is sorry to keep your comrade from you but hopes you understand. You do.

So that’s Dernier.

Dugan seems unshakeable but he isn’t.

Dugan always seemed to keep his feelings tucked tight to his chest as he kept his hand of cards when you and he played. You were one of the only ones who would play him one-on-one, given how often he won. Even you gave up on poker, with him, but you two played Machiavelli--a variant of Gin Rummy he learned from an Italian prostitute. It was a version that let you change what cards there were on the table.

Here’s what Dugan is like.

Dugan can sleep anywhere at any time but never let himself fall asleep until he was sure all the men in his unit were all right.

Dugan saw action in the Pacific. He heard the broken-down engines of poorly-made Japanese planes above. Worse than Stukas, he told you once. He told you about the manned bombs the Japanese flew down. He told you about the suicide missions, Kamikaze flyers. He said the Japanese soldiers were harder to fight than the Germans, because he knew they’d fight through anything.

“Wouldn’t you?” you asked him.

He shook his head. “This is a job,” he said. “It’s a job. I just know how to pose. You think I was really so strong, in the circus? I’m not Cap. I just learned to pose so I make the light stuff look heavy and the heavy stuff look light.”

“The circus, huh?” you said.

“It’s a circus,” he agreed.

He told lots of stories about the circus, most of them wildly embellished, and he knew you all knew that, and none of you cared. He knows when to tell a story and when to tell the truth.

Dugan, who understands the many-ringed circus act of the Army, is probably the only born soldier of the lot of you. He never asks too many questions. He knows what to shut out and, increasingly, when to shut up. He keeps things under his hat. He keeps aces there.

Monty grew into the role of a soldier somewhat. Monty is an odd duck, liable to redden and stutter at a hard word from one of you, a mad romantic about Shakespeare--but he was utterly implacable when it came to jamming a bayonet through an enemy soldier’s eye.

Throughout the war, you would see him laboring over his letters home with his brow furrowed and his fingers bunched tight down to the end of his pen. He was always writing to Laure. She was his girl back home. You learned about six months in that he had barely talked to her once and hadn’t left too good an impression but she knew his family some and worked in a factory back home. So he kept writing, trying new lines, not sure if the lack of response was due to the war or due to what he called the ‘stormier battlefront of the human heart.’

You have to admire that. Hope.

He sure is a terrible poet, though. Jones had to tactfully tell him that maybe factory metaphors about winches weren’t the best addition to his poetry.

“Don’t use a winch to win a wench,” Jones said. “And don’t call her that, either.” Monty’s face shifted from delight at a potential idea to deep disappointment.

Now, Monty: he just never shut up while you were out there fighting. You could be huddled in a hole in the ground taking fire and he’d talk your ear off. All that Shakespeare. It was words you didn’t always want to hear, words to which the only answer at the time was silence. Because what is there to say, really, when he recites Hamlet’s ‘slings and arrows’ and you’ve been facing German guns and Stukas and Hydra ray guns? What are you to say when he gets very very drunk and recites the Charge of the Light Brigade? There’s nothing to say; you know war is madness, and poetry, and so is life, and there’s nothing more to _say_. Maybe that’s why Monty was always a bit of an outsider. Because he kept trying to say it. You wish now you’d let him do that more.

He says he’s gonna try to make it to your wedding, so maybe.

You wonder if you were a good soldier What is a good soldier? You saw them all around you in the war. Men who would push through just about anything, just as long as their buddies beside them were pushing through it, too. You recall your first unit, the mixed regiment of engineers and technicians who supported deception tactics along the front lines. You’d work like mad just because everyone around you was too, everyone all staying awake for days at a stretch setting up decoy equipment to fool the Italians and the Germans about your real troop position. Working through long nights, when sound traveled the furthest. _Trying_ to be heard. Trying to get the enemy to fire on you. Long dark nights when the noise of invisible machine gun fire and tanks and Army chatter projected clear out for up to fourteen miles.

You had to strike a balance, when you ran deceptions. If the noise was too loud it sounded false. If it was too quiet the enemy wouldn’t hear, and why, then, you wouldn’t get that nice harmony of German tanks returning fire--on you, on the places they thought the Army was, instead of where it really was.

Those nights, when sound traveled the farthest, you’d ride out on your half-track with your loudspeaker blaring and other guys in trucks or half-tracks making sounds too, so the noise would doppler out effectively--so that it would make the enemy think it was real, a genuine battalion. You did the work of a whole battalion, sometimes. One that didn’t exist. You helped set up fake tanks and dig trenches to make it look from above like the Army really was there. You hunkered down in a foxhole and broadcast chatter from a radio set up above your head. Once the radio got blasted to bits and your foxhole fell in on you. You and Daley, the guy working with you, had to dig yourselves out and march the ten miles back to your unit, since you had no way to communicate.

You did all this even though it was madness, suicide. You all did it because everyone was doing it. You kept on going when so tired you couldn’t think, when your brain buzzed heavy as a cicada swarm in summer, when fatigue settled in your body like dust settled into your clothes--you kept going because the guy next to you kept going and he called you ‘cowboy.’

Once in awhile you’d come across something remarkable: someone who would push through even when no one else was. That man was not a good soldier; he was a warrior. Steve Rogers--Captain America--he was that sort of man.

You leave that thought alone and move on.

Jones is coming to your wedding. He’s out of the Army, too. He wants to get his law degree. He plans to get a whole collection of degrees, enough to paper a house with. And, he says, briefly, at the very end of the letter, he has taken up with a certain lady who will be in America herself after the war. Peggy, of course.

His job, translation, left him somewhere in the middle of the war. He understands, really, too much. He lives in many worlds. Like you--the Nisei soldiers didn’t all feel comfortable with you--the other Negro soldiers needed to reassure themselves around him, and it always took him a little time to explain Captain America to them. And what exactly you were doing.

Interpretation is a hard business. Listening to the Germans all the time can be rough. But Jones told you once that it helped him get his head clear about some things he thinks are always true. Some things that when he heard the Germans say them stood out as so wrong, but then he’d turn around and one of the guys on his side would say the same thing in a way.

“Yeah,” you said, when he told you that.

He is obsessed with finding the code behind the words. The truth of things. He talks a lot about the Constitution and how it was amended and the law is alive and he says things like ‘Spirit of the law, not letter of the law.’ You don’t always know what he means but that you do, for sure. Amateur radio--how you learned to bend under restriction. Your radio license. That’s how he sees the law. As a license to speak in the right codes.

Barnes. As uncomfortable as he made you, what with how he saved all his U.S. Army condoms for use on his rifle because he was never gonna use them with girls, you miss his awful dark wit. He shouldn’t have been a soldier. He was a great sniper, but he wasn’t a soldier. You spotted for him when Dugan couldn’t, because you had a head for figures, what with the radio. You helped him figure out windage and work the little Bakelite-cased barometer. You saw how he got. It wasn’t that he couldn’t shoot. It was the way he did it. He was so good at it because he lost himself entirely in it. He couldn’t remain himself and so he didn’t.

“I hate when people say ‘straight shooter,’” he told you once. “No bullet travels in a goddamn straight line. People who talk about being a straight shooter never shot a gun themselves.”

Like usual, he was talking about something else entirely, something different from what he was really saying. You nodded. You listened.

You figure, not that many people really did listen to him.

Sound is a wave. It travels at about 300 meters per second, more or less depending on air temperature. A bullet travels faster, at over 1000 meters per second. Barnes informed you that the difference becomes noticeable past about half a mile. Almost no one ever tries to shoot that far, but he did. He shot so far the bullet got there before the sound.

You feel that way sometimes. You feel like you have returned to America in silence, a bullet that has hit home before its noise. You wonder what will happen when the sonic boom arrives.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s not so easy to set up a radio show. You need financial backing. There are other problems.

Sound waves are quiet. Sound waves are slow. Light and sight travel more quickly, too quickly for you. You don’t say it, but part of the reason you want a radio show is this: people will hear your words, for once, before they see your face.

“I thought I’d ask Howard Stark, but he didn’t take my call,” you tell Mika one night over cups of tea after dinner. Your parents have discreetly made their way to their bedroom early.

“You need it in writing,” she says. “Trust me, if there is one thing I learned from scrambling to get more morphine out of the U.S. Army supply, it’s that you need everything in writing. Make copies. Ask several times. Eventually someone listens.”

You remember it. You helped out, too, but never had to fight for supplies the way she must have; you just pitched in when the Red Cross needed a hand or when you came across someone in the field. You got whatever you needed from being one of the Commandos. Which will help you too, a little, if you move quickly enough to cash in on the radio series based on your adventures with Captain America, too. You’ve listened to that. It’s what Barnes and Rogers called ‘terrible drek.’

You think of the sounds men in pain make. You imagine her days spent filled with that sound, with the helpless moan that is almost animal, unaware of itself. The grinding, insistent moan of need that too often goes unanswered

The thing is, though, dying men, they don’t make any noise at all. The doctors put a gauze cloth on their faces at the end. It barely moves with breath and then it doesn’t move at all. There’s no sound, then, even without morphine.

You think of the letters you send out on the radio, looking for any reply. CQ. CQ is the signal you send when you are simply trying to get anyone to answer back. CQ. _Seek you._ Is anyone listening? Does anyone have the time?

Hey, buster, you got the time? That’s what Mr. Leighton back home used to ask you when he was sitting on the stoop of the soda shop. It became a ritual when he saw how proud you were of the new watch you got as a six-year-old kid, a watch you wound yourself. Hey, buster, you got the time?

No one here in Philly stops you in the street to ask you for the time. It’s not like back in Fresno. But then, it’s also not 1941. It’s 1945, and the sonic waves of war are still roaring up behind you, and may yet swamp you entirely.

“What if he doesn’t agree?” you ask.

Mika says, “Howard Stark? Didn’t you see he wrote in to the Times about the bomb? He talked about harnessing atomic power for good. I read it because he talked about the cure for cancer, more precisely aimed radiation beams… if he wants to do good in that way, you could ask him to support your radio show as another step down the same path.” She curls her fingers around her tea and looks down into it. “I know it’s hard to ask.”

“You do,” you say. She’s wearing a thin beaten-silver engagement ring now. You want to wait to get married until the Commandos make it back from Europe. Dugan always said he’d be your best man if you did; you want to be sure it’s not all bluster. You’re also waiting for Davey to get some time in with the Symphony Orchestra… for Dr. Watabe to take his retirement and travel east out of Fresno... you’re waiting for a lot.

“I do have some idea,” she says, covering your hand with hers.

“I’ll draft the letter,” you say. “And make a copy. I figure I’ll ask for just one-eighth of how much he says he spent on the Manhattan Project, right?” She nods. You go on. “But there’s another problem. On the show… I signed a lot of documents. There’s a lot I can’t talk about.”

She’s already shaking her head, fingers playing with yours, her fingertips dancing over your knuckles. You keep your free hand cupped around your tea mug. You’re so used to drinking out of cans and pewter it’s a remarkable thing to feel warm ceramic under your fingers instead of metal that’s conducted either too much cold or too much heat.

Mika says, “That’s not what you’d do, as a radio host. It doesn’t matter as much what you say. It’s what questions to ask. It’s who you ask them to.”

“I know how to ask the important questions, fair enough,” you say.

“You’re hard to resist when you do,” she says, and your discussion is for the moment over, as you turn to more present concerns.

* * *

 You take the train out to Manhattan to speak to Howard Stark. The skyline rises above you, the Chrysler building lit up like it’s crowning the whole thing.

Howard Stark talks to you at the Russian Tea Room. You’re dressed in a suit. It feels strange and uncomfortable not to be in your uniform. In your uniform you were safe, you had an identity. In a suit you are the subject of stares, of sneers. You look too prosperous, and of course too Japanese. You think of how you felt, looking at the well-fed children of Berlin.

You bring Mika, dressed in her very best blue dress, shoulders sharp and buttons down the front almost like a uniform. You do not like the way Howard smiles at her when he takes her hand.

You have lunch and it’s mostly pleasantries until you accompany him to his Midtown office. He breezes in past a secretary and holds the door open for Mika and _then_ for you, which you consider something of an insult. You sit down.

He shows you the footage of the atomic blast test. What you notice is the very long delay between the sight and the sound. There is a spark of light like a match struck in the sky. Smoke blooms from it like a desert rose. There is a silence. Then the blast roars like wind blowing through wheat. It rolls like thunder. It slowly dies. Smoke remains hanging in the sky.

Afterwards Howard turns from the projection screen and, the lights still dim, holds out his hands in a gesture that appears to be half supplication and half pride. “You see,” he says, “It’s a terrible thing we’ve done. A great and terrible thing. Of course, we plan to harness nuclear power for much more than destruction.”

You and Mika look at each other. You say, when she nods, “We are prepared to negotiate. Are you?"

It's the questions you ask that matter. And who you ask them to.

* * *

 Stark Industries advertises itself on your radio show with a funny little jingle. It's the tune from Battle Hymn of the Republic, but the words are different. It advertises a new energy-efficient freezer unit. Stark says he has some ideas about ice on a grand scale these days. He has spent a lot of time in the Arctic. Also, the flying cars didn't pan out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -[uncut video of a nuclear test in 1953](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_nLNcEbIC8&feature=youtu.be). Note that, without editing, the sound arrives distinctly after the blast is visible.


	4. Chapter 4

Howard Stark pays so you can use the Grand Ballroom in the Plaza Hotel for your wedding, and a suite so you can stay there afterwards, too. This makes up for him not being there himself. He has returned to the Arctic. He also sends a large ice swan centerpiece for the reception. It melts over the course of the party, so that the swan appears to be crying, tears dripping off its beak. Or perhaps it has newly surfaced from some deep invisible water that runs beneath the ornamental kale leaves it sits on.

In fact, Stark has rented out the whole damn hotel. Everyone’s families get to stay there. The Barnes sisters and their parents do make it to the wedding, but they decline rooms and prefer to take the train in from Brooklyn.

Your brother Davey volunteers to play Mika down the aisle.

You are having an American-style wedding, just like your parents did; Mika doesn’t even paint her face white. Her parents are more traditional than yours, and her mother tells her to at least wear a kimono for the reception, which she does. You tried to stay out of that discussion. Mika’s mother is wound up tightly, and your own mother had to speak to her about it at some length.

While you are getting ready to get married, you talk to Davey. He’s grown into himself and looks the picture of the collegiate football star he was at Oberlin, before he left early to play for the Symphony Orchestra. He’s grown into shoulders that were too big for his gangly frame and his face has filled out. He looks like your dad used to look, before his shoulders stooped and his hair went gray. Davey’s now taller than you are.

Davey tells you San Francisco is fine but has very steep hills. He’s got a bicycle. He says that it’s a shame because there aren’t a whole lot of friendly women there. He got spoiled by Oberlin, where on account of the war most of the students were female and he had a date about every night of the week.

“There’s a lot of queers in San Francisco,” he tells you offhandedly at one point. You start, thinking of Sergeant Barnes.

“Oh, yeah?” you say. You’re not too worried about your brother personally--but maybe you’re a little curious.

“Yeah, lots of them used to be in the Army,” he says. “Miles, one of our clarinetists, told me about that.”

"Guess there's a place for anyone," you say.

"I think Oberlin spoiled me some," he admits. "It's not the same back West. Don't have a date every night for sure. Even the fairies do better."

"You okay out there?" Davey needs people around much more than you do. But your parents have their jobs in Philly and some bad feelings for Poston Arizona and frankly all of California, too.

He shrugs. "I miss you and Mom and Dad. But California still feels like home. Mom said they'll move in with me if I still wanted when she retires and you and Mika are all set."

"Oh, really," you say. You were not informed of this plan.

"Yeah, well," he says. "You might need the space."

"Oh," you say. You and Mika haven't talked about kids at all but you can predict she'll say 'not yet.' She's cautious.

“Relax, brother,” he says.

“Relax?” you say. “I’m getting married in fifteen minutes.”

Dugan, who has been nearby telling loud stories of the war that must be a different one from the one _you_ fought, turns around and says, “Yeah, so you better squeeze all your relaxing into those fifteen, because God knows--”

“Oh, please,” you say, not wanting to hear even good-natured complaints about wives.

“Uh-uh,” he says, shaking his head at you and grinning a big, self-satisfied grin. “I was talkin’ about the _honeymoon_. Hear you’ve got a whole suite. Hear the sinks are lined with gold. Hope the _walls_ are lined with something heavy-duty.”

Davey grins. He is mildly starstruck by Dugan with his bristling mustache and his brand-new hat. Dugan is of course wearing a hat to the ceremony. This one is a brilliant shiny white. “I know enough to know white’s the color for Japanese weddings too,” he says, and he’s almost got it right, so you slap him on the back. You saw him greet Mika’s mother almost about right too, bowing over their clasped hands.

So that’s your wedding party. Your groomsmen are Dugan, Jones, Monty, and your cousins. Davey plays Mika down the aisle. Dr. Watabe walks with her. She is wearing a very simple white dress, and not a silk veil but the one concession to tradition: a white hood. The veil was only a problem because of both of your associations with thin gauze thrown over dying faces.

You look at her face square on, as she comes down the aisle. It is a face whose lineaments you so long imagined, over in Europe fighting the war. You had a faded picture you kept with you, but still you remembered little details wrong. You imagined her cheeks fuller or thinner or elongated her nose. She wrinkles her nose at you when she comes to stand beside you in front of the priest. You realize you have been staring too intently. You don’t care. You will never remember her face perfectly, not even moment to moment, not even from the moment you blink to the moment you open your eyes. That’s all right.

 _It’s all right, Jim,_ says her hand clasped in yours, invisible to all watchers within the folds of her dress, the Western-style gown she’ll later swap for a kimono. _It’s all right._

* * *

 You recite your wedding vows to each other very simply. You do not add words. The words of the vows are like ancient coins worn thin by the touch of many hands. This makes them not less valuable but more. You exchange your rings and your vows, and you are for a brief instant a part of eternity.

* * *

 At the reception, you see a woman who looks familiar in a way you cannot place. She is holding a baby that blinks at you with very wide blue eyes that are the mirror of its mother’s. When she sees you looking, her face shifts into a smile that looks a little forced, and you realize she has to be one of the Barnes sisters. The one Sarge was always saying was about to have a kid, who clearly did wind up having one because here it is. The baby looks as chubbily dignified as Winston Churchill, with a solemn and somewhat disconcerting baby stare; it’s maybe a couple of months short of a year old. She hands the kid over to the tall man next to her, who is wearing Coke-bottle glasses and a tie that has gone a bit askew.

She steps forward and holds out her hand. “Rebecca,” she says, “Nelson,” and before you can ask, “Used to be Barnes. Bucky wrote us about you. He said you knew a lot about the radio.”

Even married, and even knowing she is married--you can’t talk to women. You say, “He wasn’t a bad operator himself. He had a real tight fist.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh. That’s a good thing. It means he didn’t make mistakes with his Morse code when… when he sent messages.” _CQ. Seek you. Is anyone out there?_ The time you rescued Paul Welsh and he said, _Is Captain America gonna punch out Hitler?_ And Barnes said, _Not today. So you’d better stick around._ “A fist. It’s how you code. Guys used to say I was Ham-fisted because I used to be an amateur radio man and well, Mrs. Nelson, seems I am a bit, because it only just occurs to me now to say how sorry I am. I’m really sorry. He was one of the best men I’ve known.”

She has her head tipped to one side, looking at you, and her smile this time isn’t so false. “If we’re talking about manners, I’m remiss myself. I ought to say congratulations.”

“Thank you,” you say, and then, “Buck talked a lot about you, you know. Kept talking about how excited he was to get a niece or nephew, too.”

“Nephew,” she says. Her lips quirk a little to one side, and she tilts her chin determinedly up. The gesture is familiar in a ghostly way. “His name’s Michael. If he’d hung on a couple more weeks, I would’ve named him James,” she says. She doesn’t look down. Most people would, you think, after saying a thing like that.

You hold her gaze. You say, “Mrs. Nelson, plenty of us will remember him by a lot more than name.”

You have a dance with her while Mika dances with Dum Dum and Davey dances with Lizzie Barnes for the second time. Davey, of course, is not at all like you with girls; within the first few minutes of the reception you see he’s charmed Lizzie Barnes thoroughly and gotten Jones’s sister Claire to dance with him, too.

It doesn’t surprise you that Rebecca Nelson is an excellent dancer. It’s all you can do to keep up. At some point you catch her looking over your shoulder at something and see it: her husband, Joe, is holding the baby Michael against his shoulder at the side of the dance floor and turning in slow circles like a waltz, mouthing words in a slow, low croon into the kid’s ear. They’re dancing to a different song from the rest of you and it’s a fine thing to see.

Maybe you’ll talk to Mika about kids after all.

Peggy is talking to her already, you see; so is Monty. It’s quite a tableau: Monty’s more languid pretense of British suavity juxtaposed with Peggy’s almost stiff uprightness. You can tell Mika is amused at Monty by the way she’s making exaggerated movements of her lips. She has her hips cocked slightly in that way you love to watch, one hand braced on her waist over her bright obi, the other holding a flute of champagne.

You come up behind her, interrupting them. “Excuse me, miss,” you say.

“Miss?” she echoes, pushing lightly at your chest, then drawing you in towards her, letting you wrap an arm around her waist. “I’ll have you know, I’m a married woman.”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Morita,” you say, “Do you happen to have the time of day for a poor--”

“I have all the time in the world,” she says, like you’ve rehearsed this, and you see Monty clear his throat and blink and look away. Peggy socks him familiarly on the shoulder. It’s a gesture you think she may have gotten from Cap.

“A poor what?” inquires Peggy, tipping her head to one side and reflecting, looking at you.

“Well, now, I didn’t pay for the Plaza,” you say. “That was Howard. I’m a poor amateur radio man, for now.”

“Gabe says you’re a professional radio man.”

“Oh, that’s not off the ground yet,” you say. “I need people to interview. I was going to start off with just everyday soldiers.”

“Not us of the elite guard, don’t you know,” Monty says, “Largely because we still can’t talk about what we’ve done.”

Mika says, “Yes, Jim has been very close-mouthed. If it were out of the usual for him, I’d be more impressed--”

You pull her tighter against your body and say, “Hey.”

“It’s true,” Monty says, “He is our American cowboy of few words. And what is the term, oh yes, a face for radio.”

“Yeah, see if I have _you_ on the show. You and your trying to rhyme tomato.”

Peggy snorts. She’s probably heard this story from Jones: the story of tomato as American slang for ‘woman,’ the sense of which Monty never fully grasped. _It’s tuh-may-tuh_ Barnes insisted. _Rhymes with lay-tuh_ , as in _see ya lay-tuh, alligay-tuh, I got my eye on a hot tuh-may-tuh_ \--and you’d all argued forever and never come to a satisfactory conclusion anyhow. Sometimes even just English is a dozen different languages.

Mika smiles at you now. “It’s what I was just telling them, Jim. The radio show. You think you might report on the men and women coming home. Experiences that aren’t classified. Adjusting to the Atomic Age. So you could interview Monty, or Agent Carter here, but just about their experiences of, say, barracks humor.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Peggy muses. “Mind you, I’m fairly sure the SSR will have its objections, but once you’ve broadcast, there’s no taking it back, is there? I’ve generally been of the opinion that one ought to forge ahead and--” She pauses. “Well.”

Jones has joined you. He says, putting one hand on Peggy’s back, “What’s this, now?”

“Jim’s grand life plans,” Monty says. “I was just thinking we ought to offer a toast.”

“We talked about this,” Jones says mildly. “In fact, if you wait it out for five more minutes before you give the toast, Dugan will owe me six dollars.”

“What,” Monty says, incensed. “You thought I’d give a toast before the bride’s father? You really thought--I was waiting for the optimal strategic moment, I’ll have you know.”

“That’s never been my strength,” Peggy says. But she winds up winning the bet when Monty makes a loudly poetic toast right after Dr. Watabe’s, and starts crying halfway through. Jones has to finish the stanza for him. He knows the same poem. It’s Robert Browning.

“ _Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be…_ ”

* * *

 Davey and Dum Dum Dugan are having a rousing conversation. They talk about the circus. Dugan shares with Davey one of his favorite stories: the time the lion got loose.

“The act’s about to start,” Dugan says, “And we can’t find old Cubbie anywhere--who by the way is the one they named the lion in the radio show after if you want to know. _Jerry in the Circus_. Complete claptrap, by the way. There was lots more of the rubber girl’s underthings involved in the real thing than you’d think listening to that nonsense. We had to find a kind that would stretch, y'see, so me being the strongman, they had me pull on them with her still in 'em as a test...”

Davey nods raptly, though you're fairly sure that story's a tall tale itself.

“Anyhow. Back to the lion. Cubbie’s gone and we can’t find him, and he’s due to come onstage. The ringleader’s going nuts buying time. I’m looking all over. I look in the cage. I pick up the cage and look _under_ it.” He flexes one arm; he’s very proud of his strongman past, though around Captain Rogers, he was an odd, inadequate redundancy in that regard. “Nowhere. The show must go on. I think about putting on a lion suit myself and bluffing through it. The orchestra strikes up _Stars and Stripes Forever_ , which was our song we always played in emergencies so all hands knew to be on alert. That’s funny, ain’t it.”

Davey hums the melody a little to show he understands, and Dugan goes, “Yep, exactly. Anyhow, turns out? Turns out Cubbie has just wandered out to the same place we wheel his cage before we let him run into the ring. Seems he had a little stage fright himself and wanted to be sure he made his cue on time. And the funny thing is, the show was running a couple minutes late. Seems he clawed the latch off just so he could make his mark on time. He was a creature of habit, just like all of us. Plus a born showman besides, that lion. And I ain’t lyin.’”

They talk about football, too. Dugan played in high school.

Davey tells him a story you hadn’t heard. “So before a big game with Hampshire, us Yeomen, the whole football team, snuck over in a truck in the middle of the night.”

“Sounds like some of the nights we had in France,” Dugan says.

“Well, we wanted to write an ‘O’ for Oberlin on their field in paint so they’d have to play on that,” Davey explains. “To symbolize our dominance. We also wanted it to be a big ‘zero’ for them--the score we expected to give them.”

“Good plan,” Dugan agrees.

“Only the problem is, the guys had me finish painting it on, because I’m the fastest runner. Except I didn’t get back over the fence soon enough. They called the police on me. They brought up the lights as if it were a night game… they told me to freeze. They hauled me in to the precinct, even.”

You haven’t heard this story. You stop to listen. Davey casts you an uneasy sideways glance. “Boy, did I have an awful time convincing them I wasn’t a fifth column infiltrator trying to destroy Hampshire College’s morale. My friends talked them out of anything serious, though.”

Dugan huffs and pats him on the shoulder. “I ever tell you the time your brother almost got himself shot trying to be a hero?” he says.

You beat it quick.

* * *

 Jones talks to you alone, for a bit, while Peggy and Mika take turns ribbing Monty. You and Jones stand by the side of the dance floor, watching Davey swirl Claire around like a pro.

Jones says, “Should I be worried?”

You reflect upon that. “Doubt it. He’s a good…” You were going to say ‘kid.’ You hope you still know your brother. You think you do. “Don’t worry.”

“Turned up some interesting information,” Jones says, without preamble. "I could tell you now, or... Well, rather tell you in person."

"Yeah, go ahead," you say.

“I got the records of the last talks between Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki and Truman and Churchill. Friend of mine’s a translator there."

He says a Japanese word: _mokusatsu_.

You say, helplessly, “Gabe, I don’t speak Japanese so good.”

He sighs. He says, “It’s a sticky situation. Seems our side got a bit of a twitchy trigger finger based on interpreting that word in a particular way. You can ask Mika what it means, if you want.”

“I ask her what everything means,” you say.

He smiles, faintly. “Well, this.” The smile fades. “This word means silence. More or less.”

“Oh,” you say.

“We’ll talk later. I’m sorry I brought it up. Just figured--”

“I always want to know,” you say.

“Listen, we’ll talk,” Jones says.

You clasp his hand.

* * *

 Later you ask Mika. It’s late, and the dancing is winding down, but you’re still standing and swaying to Davey’s soft violin music in the middle of the room. He’s picked up the playing again after a long break to dance himself. You see Jones’s sister Claire making eyes at him while he plays. You see Jones and Peggy are not dancing themselves, but talking very close, behind a big pillar next to the now mostly-melted swan. He has a hand on her cheek. You look away.

So you ask Mika. What does _mokusatsu_ mean? She frowns, thinking. Knowing how to speak Japanese to her parents and knowing how to turn it to English for you are two different things. She says, “It means to hold back? Not to say something. A bit like you. Or it can be… or it can be more negative. It can mean to be silent in a way that is disrespectful or shows that you don’t care for someone. It depends.”

“Oh.”

“Why do you ask?”

You say, “Let’s talk about it another time.”

“ _Mokusatsu?_ ” Mika says.

You say, “Yeah.” You touch her hair, which is pinned up again in curls. You want to pull out the pins and watch it fall down in loose coils, you want to bury your face in it. You say, “Earlier you were saying we have all the time in the world. What were you planning to do with it?”

Mika says, “You know, it’s funny. You know what Einstein says about time and space?” You both like Einstein. So does Davey, because of the violin.

You say, “Yeah. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”

Mika says, “Well, we’ve got all the time in the world, which means we’ve got awfully little space. We’re going to have to squeeze in pretty close.” She’s whispering in your ear now, or almost; she has to tip her head up quite a bit. You feel her breath on your neck.

You pull her in as close as you can, and slide your hand down very low on her back. “That’s a beautiful idea,” you say.

“It also depends on how fast we’re moving,” Mika goes on.

“Tell me more about that,” you say.

“Well,” she says. “If we move fast enough, we can leave the rest of the world behind.”

“Is that so?” you say.

“It’s all relative,” she says.

“I like your relatives,” you say. “I wouldn’t mind more relatives.”

She nudges you with one knee; you’re so close you feel any little movement like that. “I like yours, too,” she says, pressing a kiss to your jaw. “And your friends.”

“They’re all right,” you agree.

You are both mildly distracted for a moment.

“But you were saying how it’s all relative,” you say, getting your breath back, glad you’re in the shadow of one of the big pillars that borders the room.

“Time is,” she says. “It may be we’re moving faster, but that just means time will pass slower for us.”

Her voice has trailed into a whisper. Time is passing slowly _now_. You have wine and wedding cake on your breath. You have the smell of Mika’s gardenia perfume in your nose. You have the feel of her stiff silk obi beneath one hand and the thinner silk of her kimono over the soft slope of her hip under the other. The sound of Davey’s violin hangs in the air as he lingers on a tremolo: a hopeful, rapid oscillation that might go on forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -many thanks to beta [stripyjamjar](http://archiveofourown.org/users/stripyjamjar/pseuds/stripyjamjar) for help with this chapter.  
> -[mokusatsu](https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/mokusatsu.pdf): The actual impact of this is disputed, but interesting, nonetheless.


	5. Chapter 5

Monty stays in America for awhile. He says he wants to see the sights. You admittedly pay him little attention at first, as you and Mika are honeymooning. You spot him across the way at breakfast in the Plaza’s big echoing dining hall. He is wearing his customary red beret and a jaunty scarf. You watch as a young girl in a dress and coat walks up to him, looks up solemnly, and makes an enquiry. Her mother steps in to explain something.

Mika says, “You do know the Commandos are celebrities in the States.”

Dum Dum Dugan and Monty are the most easily recognized, you suppose, because of their accoutrements. You could have done that, but you were not inclined to show off. You and Jones stuck out simply because of your respective races. Jones has confided in you, anyway, that he does not want to be remembered forever for what he did during the war. He would rather be remembered for other things--though he is still doing work with Peggy at the SSR, as well as settling on which law school he would like to attend.

“I think I’m less of a one,” you say, at last.

“You’re about to be a big name,” she says, and you realize that is what you’ve signed up for, with the radio show. “A Moment with Jim.” It’s the way she says it, it makes you blink. She sighs, and smiles.

A Moment with Jim is what you are going to call the brief wrapup you give at the end of the show, after you have interviewed someone. You may now never think of it the same way again.

“Several moments?” you suggest.

“More than enough,” she assures you.

* * *

 

“I say,” Monty says, stopping by your table on his way out, “have you heard of this Rockefeller Center? There’s ice skating.”

“I’m from California,” you point out. “We’re not known for our ice skating.”

Mika has been skating in Colorado, where her family went to vacation sometimes. They have more money than yours. It’s to Dr. Watabe’s credit that he never said a word about that when you were first courting. It’s to his wife’s credit that she has not yet raised her other objections to the match.

Mika says, “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

It’s a joke, because of course you have been on plenty of adventures. But you are, in general, not prone to risk-taking. That’s probably why you survived the war. A different set of instincts may be necessary in peacetime.

Monty says, “Oh-ho, a challenge!”

You roll your eyes and say, “Well, all right.”

The Rockefeller Center is a city within a city. Buildings rise up in the heart of the whole doubled city block between 49th and 51st Streets. A grand promenade runs down the middle of it, with wide steps. This time of year, when sunset comes early and the air feels low and gray, the walkway is hung with strung-up lights. They feel exuberant, or perhaps exorbitant, in the wake of so many blackouts. The promenade is also crowded with people in wool coats, people carrying paper parcels tied with string: parcels from Macy’s or Sax Fifth Avenue.

The sidewalks have crowded themselves with prosperous humanity, clustered thickly as the drifts of snow piled by the curbs. People stand buttoned up in wool coats, wearing bonnets or hats and shiny new shoes.

In Hungary kids begged you, by gesture, for your Army boots. But you needed them. You had to keep them on.

Rockefeller was a philanthropist. This was his great work. This city within a city, this monument to the work of creation. Building it gave jobs to those who needed them in the Depression. They built a monument not to the past but to better times ahead.

Now the men coming home need jobs again. Your cousins lost their farm, too. They’ve moved up to Washington to make a go of it. You’re trying to help them out with some seed money. You hope they can own a farm, even if not a wheat farm. This is America, the land of self-made men. This is America, though in the Rockefeller Center there fly the flags of many nations, their emblems dim in the evening gloom. There are many nations here.

Dernier would love to see La Maison Francais, the French flag hanging boldly outside. The way it did when the Free French recaptured Paris: flags hung all over, festooning a city that had been lost to them.

Monty grins at the British Empire Building, which faces gardens gone dormant for the winter. Stalks poke up through a crust of snow.

It’s strange: winter. At home, you saw snow up in the Sierras. But Fresno sits in the rich bowl of a valley, and you didn’t get snow there in your youth. The cold white-capped Sierras stood far away: distant, dignified giants. The temperature gradient between warm air in the valley and cool air high up probably accounted for your ongoing difficulty with transmission over the hundred-meter band.

Here there’s snow everywhere, though it melts on the sidewalks instead of collecting in a thick encompassing blanket. You got used to that sort of snow, the kind that choked out everything, over that long hard Austrian winter: the first one you spent with Captain America and the Commandos. And then the second. You got used to a cold that came to feel like the whole world. A world of blazing white. A cold that carried radio signals far and clear.

Now the cold feels laughably temporary. You can duck into stores anytime you like. It feels fake. The whole city seems slightly unreal, so crowded with bodies that really it’s only the pretense of cold: winter as seen in a film or a play, paper snowflakes shaken from up near hot ceiling lights, like when Davey played in the school Christmas concert.

It feels like the other winter, the colder one, may never have happened.

Your body resists the memory of it. The human body does that, Mika has told you, when subject to intense stress. Like childbirth, she says. Your mind simply leaves those pangs behind. Our minds do not cling to the memories of pain.

You feel an odd nostalgia for the bottomless Austrian cold. For marches through snow with no end in sight, for nights huddled with Barnes and Dugan in a foxhole buried under a snowdrift, afraid to make a fire because the smoke will be seen, eating cold C-rations out of cans. Food so cold it had no taste, and chilled you from the inside out.

But you can’t remember it as it was. Because at the time you would have given anything not to be there in it. And it’s that feeling you miss.

You miss the pure yearning to be anywhere but where you are.

Now you are supposed to be happy. And it’s still cold. Not in the same bottomless way, a cold that seems to swallow even sound. But a cold that’s merely muffling, and from which there is easy--and uneasy--escape.

At the end of a long line of shops, you see a tall bronze statue. It’s Atlas. He holds on his shoulders the globe. The earth in this statue isn’t a burden to him at all. Rather, it’s a hollow sphere made up of concentric rings. The bands of equator and meridian, and others like slipped haloes around the empty shape of it.

Here he is: Atlas, only slightly stooped, head held up, supporting the empty shell of the world. Captain Rogers said he had admired the scale when it was put up but agreed that it looked a bit too much like Benito Mussolini. Then again, he had added wryly. _Then again, you could say I look a little too much like a Fascist poster myself._

You suppose it doesn’t matter if Atlas looks like Mussolini anymore. Or maybe it does. The same image can stand for many things, you suppose. It depends on who’s doing the looking.

It depends, like Mika says, on what questions you’re asking. And who you ask them to.

There’s a Christmas tree already up at the end of the skating rink, a big Norway spruce. It’s hung with aluminum icicles. They shift in the wind with the branches’ sway, and remind you of the chaff thrown out of aircraft to confuse German radar. You find the faraway glint of metal hypnotic.

At the top of the tree there is a foil star. You saw many stars in windows on your way here. Some were gold.

Since the war ended, you have heard terrible stories of what happened to the Jews in the Nazi camps, who were first forced to wear stars and then stripped of even that dubious badge. Lists of names, then, merely. Sometimes ages. Paper kept in neat handwriting. You found one in an old Jewish Church, a synagogue. Its windows were smashed but light came in stately through the broken glass, in drifts that piled up as softly as snow. Just light, pale enough to illuminate the stacks of ledgers and lists of names. Names and their intended destinations. At the top of the altar was an empty place where their holy scroll had once rested, and a pulpit--or whatever the Jewish people call it--emblazoned with a six-pointed star.

But this is America. Not Austria. Not Hungary. Not Sicily or France. This star catches the reflected lights, and you hear happy shouts from people skating down below.

Wind whips at you all. You have paused for a long time, you realize, quiet. Monty is used to this. So is Mika. She holds your arm tightly and presses against you in the cold. You feel the strength of her fingers even through her woolen gloves.

Monty takes a deep breath. He murmurs something: a poem.

“Blow, thou winter wind,” he says, sounding somewhat ironical, ”Thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.” This is what he does, when he cannot quite bring himself to state what he wants to in his own words. You somewhat understand the impulse. You just wish you understood what the hell half his verses mean.

“Let’s go get some hot chocolate,” Mika says.

“Is that Shakespeare?” you say, following her, turning your head to look at Monty. “We may have to throw you in the lake again.”

He sniffs. “This lake is frozen. Do your worst.”

Monty’s poetry. There is a reason for it. Early in the war, the British used poems as the cipher key to codes, the idea being that agents could memorize them in the field. That system was risky at best, as the Germans could torture the keys out of captured spies.

The idea, though, remained basically sound. And when you had to improvise, you did fall back on Monty’s poem-codes in the field.

Verse is easy to remember. Anything repetitious is. That’s the nature of life. It’s cyclical, like the birth and rebirth of cicadas. Like winter, spring, and harvest time. City boys like most of the Commandos never understood that. There’s a patience required of a farmer. You realize keenly that you are at the mercy of a natural rhythm.

The world is written in a vast and beautiful code, its key beyond your mortal grasp. You are constrained to struggle with ciphers, with the words to poems. With Einstein’s miraculously predictive mathematics, which touch the hem of something large and true. With radio waves, whose goings and comings remain a fundamental mystery; sound carried on shortwave echoes, as if you are shouting into a tunnel, a tunnel that leads everywhere.

Radios take prayer to work. Everything does. There is always something you don’t know. So you repeat the words of prayer, the words of vows. Lucky numbers. 88. The dit-dah of Morse.

The taste of cocoa on your tongue. The clink of a porcelain cup against your saucer. The grate of skates against ground-up ice as you struggle to keep your balance on the slick surface. Monty pushes you; Mika skates backwards in front of you and pulls you along. A bland-faced golden angel plays a silent trumpet just beneath the spreading branches of the Christmas tree.

All of these things will be spun through your brain into memories. They will wink there like stars. They will be called back by other tentative touches, other codes: the code to cocoa, a purity of taste you may recapture someday but never in quite the same way as you did this evening. The code to the towering Norway spruce is the smell, green and tingling in your nose.

At some point they switched from using poem codes, to writing wartime codes in simple mathematical cipher on scraps of silk. They could be used, burned, and then discarded. No memorization was necessary.

The codes you have imprinted in yourself will one day leave this world too. For the moment they are precious. They are tucked away inside you like silk sewn into the seam of your coat.

So thin. So fragile.

As temporary as breath. As sound.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -I'm still proceeding through the honeymoon. This story moves at its own pace.  
> -However, I should note that if you are interesting in contributing an interview subject for Jim Morita on his radio show, I am planning to collaborate with several people who have offered to do so. [Please see tumblr post on the topic here.](http://samtalksfunny.tumblr.com/post/132142214258/i-have-not-forgotten-jim-moritas-radio-show?is_related_post=1) Also on the roster are, potentially, Moe Berg and Jesse Owens.


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